The follow-up to Airini Beautrais's acclaimed debut collection Secret Heart demonstrates the growing reach and authority of her writing. The three sequences of 'Love Poems', 'Charms' and 'Curses' are an arrestingly original mix of observation, performance and jokes. A section of lyric poems slows the pace, and then four powerful long poems take the reader travelling, through memory and into the present, through the Wanganui backblocks, rural Germany, and other places.
